US plans smart guns

A US company has come up with technology which will make it impossible for a person who is not a gun’s owner to fire the weapon.

Safe Gun Technology co-founder Charlie Miller claims that the technology would have stopped Adam Lanza from demonstrating his right to bear arms in a US school last year. Apparently if his mum had this technology on her weapons her son would have had to have come up with another way of murdering 20 children and six Sandy Hook Elementary staff.

The technology requires a fingerprint to activate the weapon, although Adam’s mum could have configured it to let him use her guns it was not likely. Smart gun technology uses biometrics and RFID chips. In the US no one really wanted to invest in it because the people who want guns are not happy with the idea of limiting their use. Venture capitalists have not invested in them and current prototypes are based on five- to 10-year-old microprocessors.

Miller wants to get a smart gun produced within the next two months. The company hopes to get additional funding to create an updated prototype that would be available to gun manufacturers, and for retail in the form of a retrofit kit, within the next year. His method uses a relatively simple fingerprint recognition through an infrared reader. The biometrics reader enables three other physical mechanisms that control the trigger, the firing pin and the gun hammer.

Once an authorized user places his or her finger on the scanner, which is located in a natural position on the gun's grip, it activates the gun's enabling mechanisms in about one-third of a second, he said. This means that you can still shoot a burglar and if the villain grabbed the weapon they could not turn it on you.